IPv4 addresses have run out. Many service providers today are implementing or beginning to plan for the transition to IPv6. One service provider at forefront of this activity is Comcast, one of the nation’s largest video, high-speed Internet and phone providers to residential and business customers. Starting in 2005, Comcast began putting together deployment plans for IPv6 in order to address the IPv4 address run-out and to be ready to offer their customers new services that take advantage of IPv6. The Comcast IPv6 program is run by John Brzozowski, Distinguished Engineer & Chief Architect for IPv6. Read More »

The Edge of the network is a major focus for our customers, the market as a whole, and certainly for us at Cisco. The ASR 9000 System is the leading Service Provider Edge router in all three cases, and admittedly, the system is on quite a roll.

In our June ASR 9000 blog, we announced to the market the newest innovations in the platform – nV technology and the ability to scale the system to a whopping 96 Tbps (more than 36 times the capabilities of the nearest competitive platform and enough bandwidth for man, woman, and child in Beijing, London and Moscow to watch a streamed High Definition movie simultaneously). Along with that news, we had the honor of announcing five new customers joining the 500+ strong ASR 9000 family — China Telecom, NTT Playa in Japan, Tata Communications in India, Fastweb in Italy, Cox and Comcast in the US. Read More »

The transition to IPv6 presents a complex technical challenge, and the business risks for not doing it right are potentially significant, in terms of impact on customer retention and growth, new business models, and competitive edge.

In this third installation of the series, Kelly Ahuja of Cisco and Ray Mota of ACG focus on Service Provider strategies for the transition to IPv6. As Kelly mentions, the Cisco Carrier-Grade IPv6 Solution (CGv6) is designed to help address both technical and business challenges associated with the transition. The Cisco CGv6 portfolio of IPv6 solutions enables service providers to:

Prepare for the smooth, incremental transition to IPv6 services that are interoperable with IPv4

Prosper through accelerated subscriber, device, and service growth that are enabled by the efficiencies that IPv6 can deliver

It’s important to emphasize the word solution. CGv6 solution is not just a line card, or a network appliance, or a software feature. Unlike other companies Cisco has the experience and expertise to help network operators realize the promise of IPv6 by offering full Life Cycle Services Support. This is especially important as not all operators have experience in IPv6 or access to this expertise. Cisco can provide the people, processes and tools to ensure a seamless transition. Some of the capabilities our advanced services team provides include:

One of the hot topics at Cisco Live 2011 last week was around the topic of IPv6 deployment and how to handling the exhaustion of IPv4 address space, both for Enterprise and Service Providers. Over fourteen sessions on the topic were covered, including such titles as How to Convince your Boss to Deploy IPv6, Cisco on Cisco: Making the Leap to IPv6, and IPv6 Planning, Deployment, and Operation Considerations. When it comes to IPv6 implementation, there is no “one size fits all” design, which is why the Cisco CGv6 solution is intended to preserve existing network infrastructure investments, prepare for the transition to IPv6, and enable companies to prosper in the new IPv6 environment.

In the second video of our series on the Service Provider Transition to IPv6 with Kelly Ahuja from Cisco and Roy Mota of ACG Communications, we hear perspectives from cable providers Comcast (USA) and Rogers (Canada) on how they are making the transformation to an IPv6 network. Or as John Brzozowski, Distinguished Engineer & Chief Architect for IPv6 at Comcast, notes “V6 matters to everybody…” that it’s an “…industry, internet community challenge that everyone has to face.”

One critical point that John makes is the need to make the transition seamless despite the huge number of moving parts in the network. This was a key reason for Cisco’s Carrier Grade Network Address Translation implementation, which provides the scale and performance required to offer a simple way to immediately deal with IPv4 address exhaustion issues. Equally important is that many customers aren’t expected to flash-cut over to IPv4. Instead, the transition time will likely take years to ensure that Internet end users are not adversely affected by the migration.

Earlier this year, as part of CableLabs’ “Innovation Showcase,” in Atlanta, we showed how DOCSIS 3.0-based technologies can gracefully and powerfully scale, if operators were to continue increasing the number of digital channels they place into a DOCSIS bond.

The question we were endeavoring to answer was this: Is DOCSIS dead, or does it have another 15+ years of life in it? The answer is clearly the latter. Why? Because the classification and QoS features in backbone routers (like our recently announced ASR 9000 System) are architected for massive speed, in terms of packets-per-second – and those features will migrate down into cable CMTS gear.

The demo for CableLabs focused on our 3G60 CMTS cards, which bonded 48 downstream channels and 12 upstream channels, using 256 QAM in the downstream, and 64-QAM in the upstream. The result was a 1.6 Gbps downstream pipe, and 300 Mbps upstream. But that was back in February. The bond size was generous, but still partial. When you consider the full spectrum capacity of cable television systems – from 54 MHz to 1 GHz, downstream, and from 5 MHz to 42 MHz upstream – clearly, there’s a lot more breathing room for wideband IP services.

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